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| The Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) |
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There are over 6 million samples, or accessions, held in genebanks world wide. Maintaining these accessions in a viable state represents a massive investment of resources over time. However there are concerns that the return on this investment is limited due to poor utilization of the material in breeding programs. Actually finding the accessions most likely to provide the genetic variation required is a major constraint. |
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| The core collection concept was suggested as one way to improve utilization and has received significant attention for some twenty years. This approach attempts to capture as much genetic diversity as possible, with a minimum of repetitiveness, in a small subset composed of between 5-10% of the original number in the collection. Whilst offering the benefit of providing easy to manage sets of germplasm, the core collection does not necessarily deliver a set of germplasm most likely to contain the specific genetic variation being sought by the breeder. |
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| The Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS), currently under development and evaluation, is a new approach to improve the efficiency with which plant genetic resources can be utilised from ex situ collections. |
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| The rationale behind FIGS is as follows: just as the plant breeder searches for traits to enhance productivity within specific environments, germplasm can also be selected using an “environmental” vision. It is totally accepted by plant breeders that genotype by environment (GxE) interactions play a pivotal role in their science. Similarly, many genotypes held in ex situ gene banks were actually collected from the environment in which they evolved over millennium, and the geographic coordinates of the site from which they were collected can be obtained with relative ease. This information, the collection site coordinates, is the link between individual genotypes and environments, which can now be more fully exploited using modern database and geographic information system (GIS) technology. By obtaining climatic data and mapping it as various layers of information (using GIS) we can begin to exploit this genotype by environment interaction, in reverse , to identify those accessions most likely to contain the genetic variation required to improve productivity in a breeders specific, or target, environment. By adding layers of edaphic data, to the environmental and genetic information, we can greatly extend the possibilities of how we target and identify germplasm. |
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| The project |
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To develop the proposed tools the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) of Australia funded a 4 year project entitled “Technologies for the targeted exploitation of the N I Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry (VIR), ICARDA and Australian bread wheat landrace germplasm for the benefit of the wheat breeding programs of the partners.” As the title suggests, the project involves a collaborative effort between the famous Vavilov Institute of St Petersburg, Russia , the Australian Winter Cereals Collection hosted by the D epartment of Primary Industries in NSW, Australia and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, Aleppo , Syria .
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| While the idea behind FIGS encompasses all crop types held in all genebanks, this project focuses only on bread wheat landraces held in just three genebanks to develop a prototype system. |
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Each of the above institutes house sizable collections of bread wheat landraces. They are unique collections because they are from very diverse environments and feature accessions that were collected early in the 20 th century and , as such , are unique in that many of them could no longer be found in the field due to displacement by modern varieties. |
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| Project activities included: |
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| A database containing information about the genotypes and where they came from was compiled. |
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| Using historic collection mission reports, the geographic coordinates were captured thus allowing us to connect derived agro-climatic and edaphic parameters to collection sites. The idea is to build up detailed environmental profiles of the habitats in which a given genotyope evolved within. |
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| Subsets designed to capture variation for resistance/tolerance to the following traits have been developed: drought, salinity, powdery mildew and Russian wheat aphids. |
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| A core set was developed, using methodologies based on geographic locations of collection sites, to use as a check when screening the FIGS sets. The hypothesis being that we are more likely to find trait specific variation in the FIGS sets than in the core set. |
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| The suite of agro-geographic parameters used to describe the collections sites are currently being expanded and further FIGS sets are under development and will be screened where funds permit. |
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| This web-page was developed to promote greater utilization of the 3 collections focused on in this project and to promote the use of the technologies developed through this project. |
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